Simone Felice - New York Times

Now ploughing a solo furrow, this latest release showcases one of the standout tracks from Simone Felice’s recent self-titled debut alongside a handful of tracks which didn’t quite make the cut. Pulling together story snippets from the newspaper of the same name, the title track is a heart-tugging piano-driven ballad. Ending in a crescendo of voices and hand claps, there is an MJ bombast about it albeit minus the mawkish sentimentality. It stands in stark contrast to the quartet of songs which make up the remainder of this EP, stripped back acoustic affairs that channel the down-in-the-gutter melancholy of Ryan Adams.

On the simple but beautifully crafted ‘War Movie’ he tells of being ‘born of a violent kind of love’, the protagonist a dizzying concoction of over confidence and emotionally bankruptcy. With ‘The Radio’ he takes up the age old theme of escaping the humdrum, his cracked tones interspersed with piercing falsetto over the simplest of musical beds. ‘California’ takes a darker direction, chronicling a mother struggling to cope with her feelings having aborted her child. It makes for difficult listening at times but this is gutsy heart on the sleeve craft at its best. ‘Great Big Circle’ is the only mis-step here. Blessed with some telling lines (‘don’t let me die there in the brainless, aimless dark’) but a lack of coherency, it ends up a confused mess of mismatched themes and too many hummed lines. Sometimes you wish he would push the musical envelope more often but there is no doubting Felice’s talent.